Kindle Indexing, Battery Drain, and Tips for Loading Lots of eBooks

If you get a new Kindle and load a bunch of ebooks onto it at once, don’t be alarmed if your Kindle suddenly starts running slowly or if the battery starts draining quickly.

Whenever you add new books to a Kindle it has to index them so that you can quickly find things when running searches.

Indexing can take awhile depending on how many books you add, and it uses a lot of CPU power so it can bog your Kindle down and drain the battery rather quickly until indexing is finished.

If you have a large library of ebooks to add to your Kindle, there are ways to make the process smoother.

Over at MobileRead there’s a handy guide written by a longtime member with tips for the best way to load a large library of ebooks onto the new Kindle Oasis, but the same applies to other Kindles as well.

It can take an hour or more to index a few dozen books, so you want to avoid loading batches that are too large or the Kindle can get locked up indexing for days. Sometimes it can get stuck indexing too.

There’s a simple trick to tell if your Kindle is currently indexing books. Just go to the homescreen and type nonsensical text into the search box and hit enter. From the search results page, if “Text in Books” is highlighted, tap it, and it will show how many ebooks are not yet indexed. Then you can tap that entry to see specifically which books are still being indexed.

What that trick *doesn’t* tell you, however, is WHICH book is causing the problem. That means you have to delete ALL of the books you last loaded. THAT means you’re forced to load just a few books at a time. THAT means that it gets absurd to take advantage of the Oasis 2’s 32GB of storage space with a large library.

There’s another approach: Within the Kindle’s System folder, there’s a folder called Search Indexes. Delete that and create a blank text document and name it Search Indexes (without the .txt extension). That turns off indexing altogether. You can still find titles of books but not text within documents.

I just got my Oasis yesterday, and while I was downloading ebooks from certain collections I have there were ebooks showing in my cloud that are in other collections. For example I have an ‘arts & crafts’ collection and I had non-fiction ebooks showing up in the same collection on my cloud. Has anyone else experienced this? I also don’t have a ton of ebooks but enough that just downloading my ebooks took hours which I thought was pretty crazy and a bit off putting that the CPU is not capable of simple tasks. The Oasis was quicker than my 5 year old paperwhite was but not by much. As far as the battery draining, loading my books took my battery from 3/4s of a bar to completely drained in about 2 or 3 hours. Pretty insane to me since all I was doing was downloading my ebooks from my cloud. Hopefully they do a software update that fixes this issue and while they’re at it instead of just having a bar include the actual percent of the battery! I don’t understand why they haven’t already done this. I’ve also noticed ghosting on my screen too which is a bit concerning as I haven’t heard of anyone else having this issue.

I’ve had an absolute nightmare with my new Oasis, delivered Thursday, replaced Saturday. It isn’t synching all my books, collections or audible books. My collection folders are there but are empty. Kindle have been worse then useless as have Audible.

All I have to say is that I wish I had come across this post (as well as the MobileRead guide) earlier. I too have had a nightmare of a time getting my large library of books to load to my new Oasis 32gb and I too had my Oasis replaced.
The sync feature is pretty much useless for sending books to the kindle – on both kindles… I have resorted to downloading each book individually by tapping on it. My problems may very well may be due to indexing, but not sure (as I just found this post).